The artists and works in About Face employ ideas of scale, zoom, and cropping to complicate figuration and portraiture in relation to abstraction. Emphasizing images of proximity and visual intimacy or immersion, the female form, visage, and trappings loom large. About Face presents an approach to figuration perceived through the self’s inherent abstractness and an attention to abstraction that assumes as much. Ideas of defiance, insistence, and repetition are significant in the works and attitudes of the artists presented. Each, in their own way, tracks degrees of approach, withdrawal, or turning inward and considers how aesthetics can picture that path. From self-portraits to formal geometries, a sustained commitment to one’s art as an intense pursuit both fanatically private and full of tremendous humanity is evident throughout this intergenerational group. A series of large-scale paintings by Joan Brown highlight her extensive investigation of the self in portraits

Read More: About Face: Exhibition of works by a group of artists opens at Kayne Griffin Corcoran in Los Angeles